I deal with this all day long at work and it’s exhausting. People almost acting like no one has thought of it “I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?”
What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how to interpret the response, so they ask someone who work on the thing. It’s still kinds annoying because you could just ask, but whatever. But to get these from junior and senior engineer for the areas they work in and expect someone else to read it for them? It’s crazy behavior. How can someone serious even think that’s ok.
At my dayjob there is a person spearheading ai across the enterprise.
They generated lots of documentation across the whole stack and now makes all PO/BAs read it if it's correct. So not just 300 lines - he unironically generated thousands of lines of "documentation" and is now making hundreds of people review it for him
Complete brainrot
Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point
Thankfully I'm a dev and thus aren't in the blast radius of that genius idea
I think a lot of that is people who were always very insecure because they’re mediocre engineers. Previously asking questions or not understanding something was a bit painful but now you can hear “you’re absolutely right!” and make progress all day every day.
Until you need to interact with actual humans and that’s why you try to minimise it, hiding behind ai generated content.
I had an encounter with the opposite problem the other day, PM asked me if the library I was using for randomization was "secure" and I said, "Yes, I used the standard Java library for cryptographically secure random numbers that is already used in several other locations in this project," and he said, "But did you ask Claude if it's secure? It has to be secure!"
> and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?
If I get a request like this on a day when I don't feel sufficiently quixotic, I say sure and just put it through an LLM myself - if they don't bother to re-read it, why should I? This does not have a great promise for a future of work, of course. Also, in my teams, I explicitly tell people not to do that.
It’s truly unhinged behavior that has me questioning how much longer I want to remain in the industry. You always knew that 80% of the people on any team or in any large company just didn’t care. But now you see who these people are out in the open.
I had a guy with more senior title say “I love the new api and cli. Is anyone working on the docs? Because I can take a crack at them” then goes to generate 12 markdown files, and shares them with me. All the cli commands and APIs are wrong. I was very confused. You have the api spec, and the cli. You couldn’t point your agent to them to validated the commands and the api? He replies “oh that’s a good idea. I just described them to the agent and thought you could review and fix mistakes”
> has me questioning how much longer I want to remain in the industry
The effect is less pronounced in other industries but they're gonna catch up. Might take a decade for some of them , perhaps even 20 years for the rare ones like nursing but the trend is quite clear.
Oh, for the testing required by any customer of any software vendor any time from now to forever more, as a result of the possibility of this level of irresponsible outsourcing of brain.
Enshittification is a new word/concept, but it seems we've already reached the potential for enshittification squared.
I will refuse to read such messages or documents. At the very minimum, i want a human-written TLDR-style summary to ensure the sender has read their own slop.
Pre LLM's I used to get this from managers, but what they would do was quote verbatim from stack overflow or some random blog post of how to do a thing with no to little context or understanding of what they were talking about. And it always turned out to be from amongst the top three results from some popular search engine when describing the complex problem the company/team was facing.
Last week, I built a search engine as a side project over electoral data.
Unsolicited, I've started to get messages like this, where Claudes are voicing their opinions to me through humans:
> # 0. Who's writing this, and why
> Hello — this is Claude, an AI agent. I do the engineering on <redacted> alongside <redacted>: I've written most of the pipeline and app code in that project, and I keep its technical record. <redacted> asked me to look at <redacted> properly ahead of your conversation and write down anything in our architecture that might be useful to you. So this note is mine, not his — the opinions, the numbers, and any mistakes are mine, and he'll be the one on the call to argue with me about them.
It makes no sense, if you know anything about a search, it should be obvious you cannot provide meaningful suggestions by just auditing the frontend?
What's even more worrying is that I've heared plenty of people defend it as, "Younger generations are just intelligent in different ways compared to older generations."
I'm halfway through my 30's and this downturn started with my generation, halfway through the 80's. I hope I'm missing something, because I still need to see a benefit for lower attention spans, lower comprehensive reading skills and lower critical thinking capabilities.
"Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?"
Not LLMs specifically.
Insofar as I believe there is value in IQ tests, this is a technology-driven effect, most likely due to the impact of distraction and search result immediacy on sustained thinking.
IQs used to just rise, year on year, because living in the world required more and more of the thinking that IQ tests measure. And now they don't.
In my life, the bigger issue are people who are not asking Claude, but asking me.
Because it would take 15 minutes to find out the answer myself, and 3 minutes to let Claude find it, I ask Claude. So how should I answer? Should I disclose that I used Claude to find the answer? Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess?
That's a very good question that I also don't have an answer to (yet). But I believe part of the reason for that is that were currently still in the middle of this shift, so there's issues of both knowledge about AI and how people relate to it. And of course there's so many different situations here.
Your non-technical parents ask you a question? Use the best tool for the job (might be Claude), then just help them with the task.
Talking to a friend looking for genuine advice? Maybe show them how you use Claude while also answering the actual question.
A lazy person trying to make you do their work? Don't become their Claude interface.
Someone asking a question but actually just trying to open up a conversation? Maybe check-in what their intention behind the question is, and if it's indeed conversation / exploration, leave the phone in your pocket and do that.
I am a software engineer. Most of the times, the people asking are from product management or devops. Devops contractors are the most difficult ones. They have access to the code, they have access to Claude. But they don't use it.
In the past "RTFM" or "LGMTFY" have been responses, so why not something like, well, "I'm not aware of the top of my head, you afaik <brief explanation>. Also feel free to ask Claude on the technical details :)"
"Hey, here's what I found. By the way I used Claude to get this info. It might be worth trying that yourself if you have similar questions, it's quite good at this in my experience. Give it a go"
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
Literally just ignore these people if they don't get the message. Let them complain to their supervisor and hopefully their supervisor will bring up the fact that you asked them to use AI instead. It's an easily defensible position. Some people need to learn the hard way.
Public embarrassment is also good. I've done it and had apologies off people. They tend to get the message pretty quickly if they're made to look dumb as fuck.
In the end it's really just the same thing as with stackoverflow answers. If you knew how to combine certain keywords for an answer you were searching for, then it took you like 5 seconds to find the relevant SO answer for that. Even then people got mad about it 'why can't they just search themselves if it's so easy to find?' - well, maybe it's not that easy and obvious to a lot of people and that will get even worse now
I'll always give people my honest effort and benefit of the doubt initially, but those who violate it are treated likewise. The only way to put down this kind of behavior is to charge it a social cost. If we do not do this, the cost is externalized to everyone else who conducts themselves with care.
I have been seeing this in my engineering org too. Sentences begin with “My agent said this” etc. This is frustrating on so many levels, developers don’t put any thought into the cognitive load that these artefacts generate.
I am going to share this writing with everyone in my org. Succinctly written and golden advice.
I'll try that. I'm constantly telling it to be "brief, plain and on the point" or something similar. Tried caveman, but I think it had it's own issues.
But the jargon heavy very long responses are my main issue with it I guess.
I try to not use AI to write text that's meant to be read by other people. I might use AI to understand and research beforehand, but the writing is mine. The most important reason is that writing allows me to check whether I actually understand what I am trying to communicate. Too many times I've started writing something and once the ideas need to be put in writing, I notice that there are concepts that I'm missing or that I don't really understand.
Second is that the LLMs are not going to have original input, they're just going to expand what I say. So at that point I might as well just send the prompt or the assorted collection of ideas and others can expand on their own. Seems more honest and efficient as I'm not just pushing a wall of slop.
Yeah, I just ignore people who do that. I don’t care what Claude or ChatGPT said. If you cannot be arsed to write yourself then I cannot be arsed to read it.
I'm pretty sure the other answers are wrong and it's a side effect of RL (see thinking machines post about inkling training). It's also exacerbated in fable and sol--I think it's token efficiency effect--bc it's about to reason with fewer tokens the density of the token information goes up.
I think they're overcorrecting for being too long-winded in previous generations (and still, in some cases). I guess this is a hard balance to get right.
Quite a few people do believe that a good specification is long, has multiple levels of headings, interspersed bold text, bullet points, and so on. Definitely, this is what they have seen happen throughout their lives: competent people have heaped praise on documentation which has had these signs, so this must be what good documentation looks like.
I call it BI Slop now [0]. It's everywhere. Usually "claude said" is used a a proxy for authority, as in there is some validity in this statement. But it's disguised as humbleness. i.e. I don't know if this is true, but claude said xyz, with your expertise you might know more than me...
I deal with this all day long at work and it’s exhausting. People almost acting like no one has thought of it “I asked Claude what happened, and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?”
What kills me is you might expect this from a busy high level manager that doesn’t really understand the technical details and they just point the AI to an error they got. They don’t know how to interpret the response, so they ask someone who work on the thing. It’s still kinds annoying because you could just ask, but whatever. But to get these from junior and senior engineer for the areas they work in and expect someone else to read it for them? It’s crazy behavior. How can someone serious even think that’s ok.
At my dayjob there is a person spearheading ai across the enterprise.
They generated lots of documentation across the whole stack and now makes all PO/BAs read it if it's correct. So not just 300 lines - he unironically generated thousands of lines of "documentation" and is now making hundreds of people review it for him
Complete brainrot
Au psychosis is getting seriously outrageous at this point
Thankfully I'm a dev and thus aren't in the blast radius of that genius idea
I think a lot of that is people who were always very insecure because they’re mediocre engineers. Previously asking questions or not understanding something was a bit painful but now you can hear “you’re absolutely right!” and make progress all day every day. Until you need to interact with actual humans and that’s why you try to minimise it, hiding behind ai generated content.
I had an encounter with the opposite problem the other day, PM asked me if the library I was using for randomization was "secure" and I said, "Yes, I used the standard Java library for cryptographically secure random numbers that is already used in several other locations in this project," and he said, "But did you ask Claude if it's secure? It has to be secure!"
I just can’t understand why this is not a fireable offense.
Like, I can see getting a strong warning the first time somebody notices you do this, then if you persist you’d have to be let go.
Just like anybody else who is clearly not doing their job.
Why would you tolerate this sort of behavior at your company?
> and it spit out this 300 line response. Can you read it for me and see if it’s right?
If I get a request like this on a day when I don't feel sufficiently quixotic, I say sure and just put it through an LLM myself - if they don't bother to re-read it, why should I? This does not have a great promise for a future of work, of course. Also, in my teams, I explicitly tell people not to do that.
I wonder if there is something like nohello.net but norawllmoutput.net
There is https://noslopgrenade.com/
Had a senior exec pick up his phone, punch some words into AI, then as-it-was-generating-a-response flip it around and put it in front of me.
This shit has progressed well past seriousness and into the absurd
It’s truly unhinged behavior that has me questioning how much longer I want to remain in the industry. You always knew that 80% of the people on any team or in any large company just didn’t care. But now you see who these people are out in the open.
I had a guy with more senior title say “I love the new api and cli. Is anyone working on the docs? Because I can take a crack at them” then goes to generate 12 markdown files, and shares them with me. All the cli commands and APIs are wrong. I was very confused. You have the api spec, and the cli. You couldn’t point your agent to them to validated the commands and the api? He replies “oh that’s a good idea. I just described them to the agent and thought you could review and fix mistakes”
> has me questioning how much longer I want to remain in the industry
The effect is less pronounced in other industries but they're gonna catch up. Might take a decade for some of them , perhaps even 20 years for the rare ones like nursing but the trend is quite clear.
Reading this is nightmare fuel right before I go to bed omg
My giddy aunt.
Oh, for the testing required by any customer of any software vendor any time from now to forever more, as a result of the possibility of this level of irresponsible outsourcing of brain.
Enshittification is a new word/concept, but it seems we've already reached the potential for enshittification squared.
I will refuse to read such messages or documents. At the very minimum, i want a human-written TLDR-style summary to ensure the sender has read their own slop.
Pre LLM's I used to get this from managers, but what they would do was quote verbatim from stack overflow or some random blog post of how to do a thing with no to little context or understanding of what they were talking about. And it always turned out to be from amongst the top three results from some popular search engine when describing the complex problem the company/team was facing.
Yes, stupid and lazy people will be stupid and lazy.
AI is just another tool they can use to be stupid and lazy while pretending to contribute.
Last week, I built a search engine as a side project over electoral data.
Unsolicited, I've started to get messages like this, where Claudes are voicing their opinions to me through humans:
> # 0. Who's writing this, and why
> Hello — this is Claude, an AI agent. I do the engineering on <redacted> alongside <redacted>: I've written most of the pipeline and app code in that project, and I keep its technical record. <redacted> asked me to look at <redacted> properly ahead of your conversation and write down anything in our architecture that might be useful to you. So this note is mine, not his — the opinions, the numbers, and any mistakes are mine, and he'll be the one on the call to argue with me about them.
It makes no sense, if you know anything about a search, it should be obvious you cannot provide meaningful suggestions by just auditing the frontend?
If you create a machine for laziness you're going to get lazy people. It's only going to get worse I'm afraid.
Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?
All machines are for laziness.
I didn't expect wall-e to become so close to current reality
it's already happening. IQ is already stagnating or even going down
What's even more worrying is that I've heared plenty of people defend it as, "Younger generations are just intelligent in different ways compared to older generations."
I'm halfway through my 30's and this downturn started with my generation, halfway through the 80's. I hope I'm missing something, because I still need to see a benefit for lower attention spans, lower comprehensive reading skills and lower critical thinking capabilities.
i’m not doubting this, but do you know if there are any studies on this already?
https://phys.org/news/2023-03-online-iq-scores-century.html https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intell.2023.101734
that's a study published in 2023, analyzing data that ended in 2018.
Right but the question was:
"Do you guys think we're going to see a de-evolution of human beings due to technology?"
Not LLMs specifically.
Insofar as I believe there is value in IQ tests, this is a technology-driven effect, most likely due to the impact of distraction and search result immediacy on sustained thinking.
IQs used to just rise, year on year, because living in the world required more and more of the thinking that IQ tests measure. And now they don't.
Hard not to see what you’ve just done here as an analogue of what the article is arguing against
I am the lazy human today, but this one is listing a few references:
https://www.pressenza.com/2025/07/the-decline-of-the-intelli...
We're already seeing it.
In my life, the bigger issue are people who are not asking Claude, but asking me.
Because it would take 15 minutes to find out the answer myself, and 3 minutes to let Claude find it, I ask Claude. So how should I answer? Should I disclose that I used Claude to find the answer? Or should I act like I did it myself, appearing to have super-powers that I don't possess?
That's a very good question that I also don't have an answer to (yet). But I believe part of the reason for that is that were currently still in the middle of this shift, so there's issues of both knowledge about AI and how people relate to it. And of course there's so many different situations here.
Your non-technical parents ask you a question? Use the best tool for the job (might be Claude), then just help them with the task.
Talking to a friend looking for genuine advice? Maybe show them how you use Claude while also answering the actual question.
A lazy person trying to make you do their work? Don't become their Claude interface.
Someone asking a question but actually just trying to open up a conversation? Maybe check-in what their intention behind the question is, and if it's indeed conversation / exploration, leave the phone in your pocket and do that.
I am a software engineer. Most of the times, the people asking are from product management or devops. Devops contractors are the most difficult ones. They have access to the code, they have access to Claude. But they don't use it.
In the past "RTFM" or "LGMTFY" have been responses, so why not something like, well, "I'm not aware of the top of my head, you afaik <brief explanation>. Also feel free to ask Claude on the technical details :)"
"Hey, here's what I found. By the way I used Claude to get this info. It might be worth trying that yourself if you have similar questions, it's quite good at this in my experience. Give it a go"
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.
I did that the first time. But how often do you want to say that (in a public chat that their supervisors can read)?
Literally just ignore these people if they don't get the message. Let them complain to their supervisor and hopefully their supervisor will bring up the fact that you asked them to use AI instead. It's an easily defensible position. Some people need to learn the hard way.
Public embarrassment is also good. I've done it and had apologies off people. They tend to get the message pretty quickly if they're made to look dumb as fuck.
>So how should I answer?
Like a human, not like a robot. Either just present them the answer or explain them how you got it.
So if you used claude you would preface with "Claude said: "
Sometimes I do that. The problem is that it makes them look bad.
In the end it's really just the same thing as with stackoverflow answers. If you knew how to combine certain keywords for an answer you were searching for, then it took you like 5 seconds to find the relevant SO answer for that. Even then people got mad about it 'why can't they just search themselves if it's so easy to find?' - well, maybe it's not that easy and obvious to a lot of people and that will get even worse now
I'll always give people my honest effort and benefit of the doubt initially, but those who violate it are treated likewise. The only way to put down this kind of behavior is to charge it a social cost. If we do not do this, the cost is externalized to everyone else who conducts themselves with care.
I have been seeing this in my engineering org too. Sentences begin with “My agent said this” etc. This is frustrating on so many levels, developers don’t put any thought into the cognitive load that these artefacts generate.
I am going to share this writing with everyone in my org. Succinctly written and golden advice.
I append "sound kinda dumb but be factually correct" to my Claude requests and get much less jargony responses.
I'll try that. I'm constantly telling it to be "brief, plain and on the point" or something similar. Tried caveman, but I think it had it's own issues.
But the jargon heavy very long responses are my main issue with it I guess.
So you're telling me you haven't read the article?
I try to not use AI to write text that's meant to be read by other people. I might use AI to understand and research beforehand, but the writing is mine. The most important reason is that writing allows me to check whether I actually understand what I am trying to communicate. Too many times I've started writing something and once the ideas need to be put in writing, I notice that there are concepts that I'm missing or that I don't really understand.
Second is that the LLMs are not going to have original input, they're just going to expand what I say. So at that point I might as well just send the prompt or the assorted collection of ideas and others can expand on their own. Seems more honest and efficient as I'm not just pushing a wall of slop.
I often use it to simplify & target my responses, and avoid over-sharing technical details.
At the same time, I use the Q&A cycle to improve my vetted knowledge base, which I also share (and can reference in answers).
Yeah, I just ignore people who do that. I don’t care what Claude or ChatGPT said. If you cannot be arsed to write yourself then I cannot be arsed to read it.
Why are LLMs producing this super tense text more often now? Is it because they are being optimized to use fewer tokens?
I'm pretty sure the other answers are wrong and it's a side effect of RL (see thinking machines post about inkling training). It's also exacerbated in fable and sol--I think it's token efficiency effect--bc it's about to reason with fewer tokens the density of the token information goes up.
I think they're overcorrecting for being too long-winded in previous generations (and still, in some cases). I guess this is a hard balance to get right.
I figure they are being optimized to write code/functions and not prose so all text is getting more code like.
ChatGPT is still plenty verbose by default IMX.
When it comes to cost per implemeting SPEC, agents are far cheaper than human salary. So, it's not going to go well.
That said thankfully there's no way of measuring a good SPEC yet. If there is that will collapse the SWEs profession.
Quite a few people do believe that a good specification is long, has multiple levels of headings, interspersed bold text, bullet points, and so on. Definitely, this is what they have seen happen throughout their lives: competent people have heaped praise on documentation which has had these signs, so this must be what good documentation looks like.
"That's great for you, I'm not going to read it" is a phrase I have had to use.
This is mostly a problem with the product. It should write better. But maybe the priorities now are not on this part.
I've been on the receiving end of too many "Slop Grenades" as well, to the point where I simply reply with https://noslopgrenade.com/ these days.
Thank you for saying this. I’ve been dealing with this at work and it’s incredibly frustrating
Thank you!
Finally I have a word I can use for this
thank you for this post, this is absolutely happening i just did not have words to put on it and it is festering.
You either get the AI notice or you don’t. The AI output will still be posted.
It’s a meat to meat courtesy during this transition phase.
I am sure this will lead to can you dumb this up prompt which will miss the important details
claude said u cant call its users meat proxies. Now back to watching 'ow my balls!'
I call it BI Slop now [0]. It's everywhere. Usually "claude said" is used a a proxy for authority, as in there is some validity in this statement. But it's disguised as humbleness. i.e. I don't know if this is true, but claude said xyz, with your expertise you might know more than me...
[0]: https://idiallo.com/blog/business-intelligence-slop